Ever have one of those moments when you see some new product being advertised and think: Hey! They stole my idea!

Lots of folks think up stuff in a bar talking to a mate one night, only to have the idea float off. Not many actually get out and work on products. I've been lucky because my job -- technology strategy consulting -- has constantly let me look at big and small businesses and how they develop and deliver products to market. So I've seen lots of other people develop products, spend lots of money, and try to get traction. Sometimes these products looked useful. Many times they did not. Some made money. Others didn't.

Many, many times when I was in my 20s or 30s I would be approached by people who had a great idea and were looking to team up for a startup. Being a hotshot programmer and architect, I never took the bait. Why should I? Consulting rates were great, most startups fail, and if I could pick winning startup ideas I'd be playing the stock market and not slinging code and training project teams.

But then I started seeing people I knew retire on money they'd made on startups, and my opinion started changing.

I became a startup junkie.

That was about ten years ago, and since then I've had the feeling of "That's my idea!" only about half a dozen times, but each time they were products worth hundreds of millions or billions dollars -- and each time they were products that I spent real time and money developing only to run out of money before they really had a chance to take off. Hey, maybe I'm able to spot these things after all.

Buy my Jeep and let's find out.

What sucks is running into bugs -- not mine, but the compiler's. Here are two I ran into last week that's caused a lot of pain (and information about a possible third one)

A while back, Paul Graham wrote a language called Arc. After he wrote it, he challenged other languages to create a simple set of web pages in as few tokens as possible. In Paul's philosophy, the fewer tokens a language has (or needs) the more robust it is. Therefore the more likely it is to last a hundred years

I've been thinking about Paul's assertion for over a year now. I've programmed in lots of languages -- to me they're just tools. Old friends. I can't say I am crazy about one language or another, no matter how many tokens it has.

As I and others pointed out, you can make a computer language do almost anything in as few tokens as you like as long as you've set up a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) for the problem domain.

Since I'm building my product almost from scratch, I thought I would take you through a quick tour of how you end up with powerful "languages" that have maximum expressiveness and minimum tokens, no matter what tools you are using. For this discussion, we'll stick to a (mostly) .NET stack, with some major modifications, but the stack is really not important.

Others have made the case that as science gets more and more complex, the amateur really has little to offer professional scientists. There's simply too much complexity nowadays.

I don't buy that, and here's why:

Almost immediately I became a robot-magnet.

Robots were emailing me to tell me that I asked too little for my Jeep -- if only I clicked this link I could see how much it was really worth.

Robots were emailing me to tell me that there was another vehicle just like mine that was priced lower -- if only I clicked this link.

Geesh.

What was the first-written book of the New Testament?

If you answered "Matthew", you might want to read up a bit on what scholars currently know about the bible.

Most scholars believe First Thessalonians was the first book in the New Testament written. What about the Gospels? Is Matthew the first Gospel written? Wrong again. The first gospel written is widely believed to be Mark. Mark -- without the extra verses tacked on at the end -- is considered one of the best sources we have of what early Christians had for a bible.

First, from the size of me you can obviously tell I've been eating somebody's cooking. Secondly, as you can see, pair programming is alive and well here. My partner and I work long hours making sure the code is exactly right.

I don't want to get into any kind of personality dispute, but my partner has a tendency to lose interest and fall on the floor quite a bit. He's obviously the brains of the operation -- the strong silent type. I figure after all these years of being both a high-level consultant and a code monkey, it was time to join forces with my logical ally, sock monkey.

And you can't beat the swank evening work area we have -- couch, TV, music, munchies, and pillows. Sock monkey doesn't talk a lot, but I can tell from the way he looks that he is really liking our coding crib.

So for all those entrepreneurs out there who are reading the self-help startup books and are excited about your new application, it's wake-up time.

You will fail.

I thought somebody should tell you that, because we don't talk about it enough. Odds are, you will fail. That's doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your team, your idea, your market, or any of that. Stats show that most teams -- even teams that are rated highly in all success criteria -- do not meet the expectations of founders and investors. In fact, most kind of fizzle out after a while. This is not my opinion, it's just stats.

This is why investing in startups looks so comically tragic from the outside: nobody really knows what will work or not, so at the end of the day it's intuition and gut feelings. Of course it's funny: at an early stage investors are writing checks for real money based on less information than the average horse better has. They just try to dress it up more.

But whatever you do, however, keep trying! The world needs you. Entrepreneurs in startups are going to change the future of mankind, and they're going to do it over the next decade or two. At this time in our history, being an inventor and innovator is the highest calling anybody can have in life.

Just be honest with yourself about the odds. And when you do fail, whatever you do, don't go on the internet and write a long tirade about how everybody else is to blame. Sure, it will feel that way. Worse than people not giving you an honest shot (which sucks if you are used to being a hyper-achiever) is watching other folks take your ideas and get funding and run with them. That kind of pain can last a long time, I know.

The best way to look at it? It's a numbers game, just like sales. Books and positive reinforcement and all of that exist to keep you motivated and playing the numbers. So try to fail quickly. Try to pivot from your original idea to something else. If you can fail at 40 different startup ideas in your life, you're going to kick-ass at one of them. Learn to laugh at yourself and others -- all while you're working as hard and as smart as you can.

Just thought I'd say that. I think a lot of times it's easy to lose track of reality in this business.

As for me and my startup? I'm going to keep plugging away. I'm in startups because I want to make the world a better place, I want to help people, and I want to create, not just consume. When I die I don't won't to look back on all the times I quit, I want to look back on all the times I tried. Sure, quitting is logical at some point. But lots of times I've quit before I even really gave things a chance, and I don't want to do that any more. I try because trying is good, noble, and honest. I'd trade a life full of trying as hard as I could any day for a life where I tried half-assed and hit it big on startup #1 and then never created another good thing for mankind. In fact, most guys I've seen that sold out successfully on a startup lost track of who they were, drifting from one half-assed investment to another, never able to devote themselves to any one thing again. After all, why pour yourself into anything? You might fail!

But I'm no fool, either. Life (and the market) is not a meritocracy, and simply because I work hard and am a good person doesn't mean that anything good is going to happen. I'm not doing a startup to cash out in five years. I'm doing a startup because that's who I am. You try hard, life kicks you in the ass, you learn more, and then you try hard again.

Just try not to do things you'll regret while doing it.

We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.

You know who you are: you're the ones with the list of fallacious argument types on a little index card beside your monitor. Heck, you might even have a web site dedicated to "clear thinking" or something like that. You're the people who make the first post under an article and allege "Ad Homimem!" or "Appeal to Authority" and then spend the rest of the day having people call you names.

It's gotten so prevalent that sometimes when I'm on a busy internet site I feel like I'm at a lunch counter where people are yelling out orders: "#15: Gambler's Fallacy!" or "#7: Red Herring!" or "#23: Affirming the Consequent!"

Boy do I feel your pain.

Very well, actually.

Here's a brain dump of things I've learned over the last month. As always, take what you can use and leave the rest:

So, for instance, the next time you're looking for hamburger casserole recipes, hopefully you'll hit one of our sites. (If you go there you'll find there isn't anything salacious or untoward: it's just sharing some of the best recipes we have for hamburger casseroles to people who are looking for some)

This has been an eye-opening experience, so I thought I'd share a bit of what I've learned.

I've become a bit of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) freak. Not a spammer or anything like that, but somebody who is beginning to understand how different pages get ranked different ways on different search engines. I'm starting to learn, for instance, how Google knows how to sort the results of your search.

I now understand why my blog will always be 3rd or 4th string: I have no focus. Or rather, I write like a normal person writes in their diary and not like a targeted money-making machine. There are guys who can do this: find a small niche and write the heck out of just stuff in that niche.

I am not one of those people.

I get bored easily, and the blog is mainly for me. So it's always going to be a mishmash of whatever I like. Cross out the plan for world-domination through blogging.

But there is an undeniably addictive nature to these games. Each game not only competes with other games that a person might play when bored, but it also competes with stuff a person should be doing.

So -- where's the line? Would you write a game that "entertained" doctors in surgery? (Put another way, if you were designing medical software, would you add game-like hooks to keep people's attention focused on it as a way of competing with other medical devices?)

Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch? A game that millions of people spend 40-hours-a-week on, like Wow? FaceBook's games are using players to perform hours and hours of menial, mindless tasks as they market and sell to them and other FB users. At what point do you cross the line between simply entertaining people and harmfully manipulating them and using them?

"list of electronic tools for lean and kanban teams http://bit.ly/6WW8cS #kanban"

(Kanban is a way of doing work where you use a board to show a "flow" of work and limit the number of activities in any one stage to a certain number)

To which a friend of his replied:

"Yeah, the whole idea of managing the pipeline in a structured way makes a lot of sense. In fact, strange as it sounds, I can see how you could apply the principles to a larger enterprise waterfall of iterative project[s]. You could use it to focus the team on the immediate pipeline...

Yikes!

I suppose something in the form of a XKCD comic or a couple of sentences might not be too much?

On one hand, I really feel for the guy, as evidenced by my own struggles with distractions. But on the other hand, something's out of whack.